In commercial oven cooking of meat to be packaged and store, cooking temperatures are generally kept low, with the internal temperature of the meat usually kept below 160.degree. F. This prevents the meat from drying out, but fails to provide the aesthetically pleasing browning of the exterior surface of the meat that comes with home oven cooking where the oven temperature ranges from 350.degree. F. and up.
One proposed solution to this problem has been to dip the meat in or baste it with an aqueous solution of caramel coloring prior to cooking. This technique, however, can result in uneven and blotchy coloring on each piece of meat and does not yield uniform color from one piece of meat to the next and requires handling of the messy solution and/or the messy treated meat. Moreover, many caramel colors react with meat cookout juices and form a black precipitate on meat that has been dipped in a solution of such a caramel color.